(no subject)

[0nlymemories]

1. What sort of profession in the wizarding world would you choose and why?
   If I’d grown up in the Wizarding world (which, given my family, I probably would have) I would probably have wanted to go into the American equivalent of the Aurors. If magic didn’t have a fix for my Ehlers Danlos, I probably wouldn’t have been able to succeed (it’s hard to be an Auror if you can’t run for long periods of time without dislocating joints, I would imagine) and I would probably end up managing a wizarding band, because I’ve always been interested in music and I have a knack for both handling highly strung artist types and high-stress situations, which is roughly 90% of what managers do.
   
   But man, if I could, I’d be an Auror. It’s like the perfect balance of doing stuff that materially helps people live better lives, having a job that other people respect and admire you for, having a positive outlet for my aggression, and wicked awesome benefits. It’s dangerous and often horrible, but they take really good care of each other/aren’t really hurting for funding as an organization.
   
   
2. You have to venture deep into the Forbidden Forest one night. Pick one Harry Potter character other than Hagrid and one object (muggle or magical), besides your wand, that you'd want with you.
   
   Post-Azkaban Sirius Black and reinforced kevlar body armor. Sirius because it’s obvious that he picked up a lot of wilderness/survival skills while on the run, and body armor because it seems like most people don’t take into account how hard it is to protect against physical attacks you don’t see coming, even when you have magic.
   
   
3. If you had the opportunity to live forever, but your family and friends did not, what would you choose? And if you did choose to live forever, what would you do with eternity?
   
   If I were able to choose to stop (i.e. stop taking the potion/take off the locket/set the painting on fire, whatever) whenever I wanted to, I would definitely live forever. After a few decades of collecting compound interest I’d never have to worry about money again, and I could spend all of my time meeting people, making new friends, acquiring new skills, and trying to influence the world as a whole to be a less horrid place. Also I would end up with a wicked awesome hoarder castle full of fascinating stuff, and might live long enough to see colonies established on other planets. Who wouldn’t want to be around for that?
   
   
4. If you could travel back in time to one point, when and where would you go? Why?
   
   I wouldn’t want to travel back in time to any really momentous or important moment because time paradox gives me hives and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for changing the course of the planet on accident, but I would really love to go back to 1995 and see some of my favourite bands (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, Alanis Morissette) perform supporting my favourite albums of theirs.
   
   
5. What HP character do you identify with most and why?
   The circumstances of my life have been very different (obviously) but I think the character that I most identify with is Draco Malfoy. I had a pretty awesome (albeit not nearly as financially privileged) childhood, and when I was 11, the thing I most wanted was to make my parents proud of me. Then everything went to hell in a handbasket (recurring parental unemployment, medical problems for a lot of my family members, including myself, having a house foreclosed from under us, having to live with a seriously ill relative to avoid homelessness) and I ripped myself up, trying to maintain my view of myself and my family that I had had before that point. I tried so hard to be what they wanted me to be that I basically ruined my life (and became a really horrible person in the process) and was left as an adult trying to pick up the pieces and figure out who I wanted to be, because I’d never really thought past having wanted my parents to be proud of me to realize that all my parents wanted for me was for me to be happy and successful.
   
   I definitely don’t think that our lives were perfectly parallel, or anything, but the desperation to live up to what was expected of him that I saw in Draco in the later books definitely resonated with me. As did the frustration of never being as successful at the things you wanted to accomplish as you thought you should be.
   
   
6. What would you see if you looked into the Mirror of Erised?
   I’d like to say that I know exactly what the answer to this question is, but I don’t really know. My best guess is that I would see me much older, but aging gracefully, with a husband that loved me (and still looked awesome for his age), surrounded by my adult children and their significant others (or not! If they didn’t want them) and their kids.
   
   The stuff that I don’t really know how it would translate into a picture that I most desperately desire is success and respect in my professional life and the professional life of my husband, health and financial security for both us and our children, academic and personal success for them, and the perpetuation of my line/knowing that people whose lives I helped shape will go on influencing the world long after I’m gone.
   
   
7. Do you believe that moral actions should be judged by the intentions behind them, or by the consequences they create?
   Both. Incredibly well-intentioned actions can have catastrophic consequences, and wonderful things can spring from the most venal and petty of actions. You have to take both into account when assessing the end result, I think. You don’t want to encourage people to seek every opportunity to avoid taxes, say, but at the same time it’s hard to disapprove of all of the charitable works that are funded by trusts. And you shouldn’t forgive someone who accidentally annihilated a species of birds because they thought the mongeese would eat the rats they accidentally brought with them on their ship, you know?
   
   But I also don’t think that “morality” is as clear cut as saying that one pole is “good” and the other is “bad. Someone who breaks a law (say, one against sharing corporate secrets) to save a life (for instance, because a drug is unsafe in certain circumstances) is going to be guilty and deserving of punishment to someone who values the law more than the life, and is going to deserve reward to someone who values the life more than the law that was broken. In that instance it’s easy to say that one stance is “better” than the other, but when it comes to things like assessing blame for the financial market crisis, where individual people were pressured to come up with ways to inflate shareholder profits in order to keep their jobs, and in doing so basically “invented” money that eventually lead to the current recession, it’s much harder to say that each person at each step of the process was “wrong” to have done everything in their power to remain employed and to provide benefit to their company, because the steps were incremental enough that most of them probably didn’t look any more like “lying” or “stealing” than any complex financial instrument does. I guess I’m emphatically a “shades of gray” type person. The kind without the BDSM in it.
   
   
8. What was your ideal job as a kid? Has that changed? What is your ideal job now?
   I’m fairly certain that I had at least 30 ideal jobs before the age of 10. Off the top of my head I know I wanted to be a paleontologist, an egyptologist, a vet, a lawyer, the president, a politician (two very different aspirations), a movie star, a director, and a novelist. Generally whenever I had an interest I wanted to be the person in charge of the action in whatever that thing was, because I’ve always gravitated towards positions of authority. I don’t really do well with having no direct control over the work that I do, because it makes me frustrated and bored, and I get somewhat nasty when frustrated and bored.
   
   My ideal job now is being a consultant to a Korean music label for their English-language promotions, both with regard to marketing and preparing artists to interact with English-language media, because it’s pretty much all of my favourite things at the same time. I’m about to move to Korea to teach English, and have experience teaching English as a foreign language from college, my degree is in American Studies, focused on English-language Musical Culture, and I’ve been doing promotional work for English-language labels for years, so it would give me an opportunity to bring all of my skills to bear in a meaningful and satisfying way, as well as putting me in a position where no one is more qualified to do what I do than I am, which would be incredibly rewarding for me.
   
   
9. If you were able to invent one spell, potion, or charm, what would it do, what would you use it for or how would you use it, and what would you call it?
   I would invent a prognostication tool that would allow people to discern which plan of action had the best long-term chance of success. I would probably use it for every romantic, personal, professional, and family decision I ever had to make, and I would probably call it Bayes’ Prognosticator, after the best non-magical tool for calculating chances of success in such situations. (It would just require way, way less information to work correctly, and would be easier to implement in non-numerical ways. Which would be good for me, I’m pants with numbers.)
   
   
10. If you were to face a boggart, what would it turn into? And what does it turn into when you throw the counter-spell, Riddikulus?
    
    Since a life of unmitigated dissatisfaction and mediocrity is sort of hard for a boggart to personify, it would probably turn into a giant Sydney Funnelweb spider. I like spiders, as a rule, but I have a complete and utter incoherent phobia of Funnelwebs that stems from a Discovery Channel special on Australian wildlife that I watched when I was 7 or 8 years old. It had a “dramatic reenactment” of a funnelweb that fell into a pool attacking someone’s arm when it brushed against it, and I have had nightmares about it for nearly 20 years.
    
    I suspect that if I successfully executed the curse it would turn into a baby spider of any entirely different type (like a Lynx spider or one of the small jumping spiders) because they’re adorable and entirely non-terrifying, in a neoteny-heavy way.
    
    
11. What do you look for in a friend?
    The people I’m closest to generally tend to be people who I “get” in a way that no one else has ever understood them. I help them understand the way they/their brains/the world works in a way that they didn’t have access to before, and in the process of trying to figure out how they will best understand I usually learn a lot about myself and the way I see the world. They’re my “best friends”, probably at least in part because I can do something for them that no one else can and thus they make more of an effort to stay close with me than other people.
    
    Generally speaking I’m a “lots of acquaintances, fewer friends” sort of person, because while I’m really good at finding things in common with other people, there are very few people that share more than three or four interests/ways of seeing the world with me, and it can get sort of stifling to one express one part of your personality at any given time. Which means I have lots of brief interactions on facebook or what have you, but very few people I can go to when I’m in the middle of an existential crisis and all I need is for someone to make things make sense. Which can get sort of lonely.
    
    
12. What trait most annoys you about other people?
    People who refuse to consider the reasons they have for doing the things they do/seeing the world the way that they see it. This is partially a result of having been in a cultural theory-heavy major in college, and partially just because I am all about metacognition, but nothing gets on my nerves faster than people who cannot comprehend that their perspective warps their understanding of situations or that someone else might not see something the same way that they do. And this bothers me pretty much across the board, not just with people whose ideologies diverge significantly from mine.
    
    
13. What do you think are your top five abilities or qualities?
    1. I am extremely intelligent. Graduated with a cumulative 3.4 gpa from an elite liberal arts college with a writing-heavy major without ever having revised a draft or taken notes, intelligent. I can pick up enough information about a subject in a few hours of poking around on the internet that people who specialize in that thing ask me if I’ve studied it intensively.
    2. I read people well. My sister refers to this as our “con man genes,” but through some combination of native talent and having grown up as a military kid, I’m very good at cold reading, and very rarely have difficulty picking up on a person’s concerns or motivations in person.
    3. I’m charismatic. When I did Live Action Roleplaying I had to give my characters high charisma and persuasion (or the game-appropriate analogues) because otherwise I felt like I was cheating, because I was better at talking the GMs and other players into doing things my way than I had any right to be.
    4. I have a fantastic memory. Other than the occasional aphasic moment, I can pretty much remember anything I’ve ever learned within 30 seconds, including extremely complex points of history or theory that I haven’t studied closely in many years. I picked up where I left off in learning German after not having studied it for five years and had only lost a few pieces of vocabulary. I almost never forget a face.
    5. I’m not actually a heartless bastard. Quite a few people have accused me of this over the years (and the reasons for thus will be covered pretty adequately below) but one of the reasons that I don’t suck utterly as a person is that I do care for the wellbeing of other people. I believe that people are innately good, and that if you look hard enough you can find reasons for basically all the stupid, hurtful things that humans do to one another, and that if you can explain it well enough, most people will always choose not to do the hurtful, shitty thing. I take really good care of my friends, I defend them when they can’t defend themselves and do my best to give them the tools so that they can defend themselves. I cry at movies and those stupid inspirational segments during the Olympics, and I empathise deeply with people and fictional characters with very little provocation. I try really, really hard to always understand where people are coming from, and to not make baseless judgements about others.
    
    
14. What do you think are your top five weaknesses or worst qualities?
    1. I hate being bad at things. I will go out of my way to avoid situations where I don’t excel, to the point that I’ve given up doing things that I enjoy doing because they made me feel stupid, uncoordinated, or too embarrassed to try. I’m still working on this one, and I’ve gotten slightly better at it, but despite being a fairly good bellydancer I will avoid situations when I know people will ask me to dance because I’m afraid that people will think that I look stupid.
    2. I’m bossy/arrogant. It takes a lot of evidence for me to believe that someone else has a better grasp of a situation than I do, and I don’t really work gracefully under other people’s supervision. When I know that someone is better at something or more informed than I am, I don’t have problems doing what they want me to do, but in a vacuum I will always try to put myself in charge. I also don’t really deal well with people making what I see as illogical statements, which gets me in trouble all the time on the Internets. (Although, again, I’ve gotten much better about handling this. I go out of my way to avoid places on the internet that I know are full of wank, and when I really want to put someone in their place I either go read for a while before replying or get my sister to read the conversation to make sure that I’m not being irrational and/or unduly mean before I reply.)
    3. I’m argumentative. While I don’t generally mean to be mean/difficult, my standard mode of communication reads as very aggressive to a lot of people, which makes some people uncomfortable. In addition to that if someone tells me I’m wrong, I pretty much have to be dragged away from the resulting conversation, because I will argue my position until either the other person is convinced that I’m right or they manage to convince me that my original assumptions were incorrect. This definitely relates back to point 2 and is exacerbated by point 4.
    4. I am prone to snap judgements. While most of the time I’m good at assessing a situation correctly, when I make a mistake I very rarely realize it until someone brings it to my attention, which usually starts an argument (see point 3) that can get quite messy. I’m fairly good at recognizing that I’m wrong when it’s brought to my attention, but getting me to the point of recognition can sometimes be quite unpleasant for everyone involved.
    5. I have a temper. Sometimes I just pick fights for the hell of it. This isn’t a particularly common occurrence, but when I’m angry, I’m angry. There are a few people who I will listen to when they tell me to sit down and shut up until I can behave myself, but especially in highly stressful situations or in situations where I don’t feel in control of myself/my surroundings I can get really, really nasty.
    
    
15. Define in your own words the following key traits:
    
    • Courage: Courage is doing the right thing knowing that the consequences will hurt. Courage is facing your fear and doing your best despite it. Courage is extending forgiveness when you have no guarantee that it won’t be turned around to hurt you. Courage is being vulnerable for the sake of feeling, and accepting that any hurt you incur will be worth avoiding entropy. Courage is fighting to make the world you believe in the world you live in.
      
    • Loyalty: Loyalty is telling your friend they’re making a bad decision and accepting their anger. Loyalty is still being there when the consequences of their actions bite them, and not saying “I told you so.” Loyalty is standing by the people you love, through good and bad, because they’re the kind of people that deserve to be supported. Loyalty is trying to save a friend from ceasing to be that kind of person. Loyalty is not hating your friends when they do the same for you.
      
    • Intelligence: Intelligence is raw processing power. Intelligence is being able to look at a blank piece of paper and seeing all of the millions of things that could be there instead. Intelligence is being able to harmonize on the fly. Intelligence is knowing who to ask to find the solution to a problem you can’t solve. Intelligence is knowing when you can’t win, but knowing what you need to learn or acquire to make it so you can.
      
    • Ambition: Ambition is never being happy with “good enough.” Ambition is doing things that you hate so that one day you will never have to do them again. Ambition is making sacrifices to further your future goals. Ambition is living with a plan. Ambition is wanting more for your children than you had yourself. Ambition is the fire that forges greatness. Ambition is insecurity wielded as a weapon. Ambition is rooting out the things that make you weak so that no one can use them against you. Ambition is believing that you deserve the thing you most desire, and that everything you’ve ever suffered will be worth it if you attain it.
      
    
    
16. Name: Kitty
    
17. Age: 26
    
18. Where did you find out about us?
    Saw a notice on Lena’s facebook.
    
19. Do you plan on being active in the communities once you are sorted?
    I can’t guarantee that I will always be super active (I’m going to be moving across the world and starting a fairly time-intensive job in a few months) but I enjoy doing community activities. So yes, I plan on being active.